Infinite Skin
by resoundingdeluge
Summary: Look at me, and tell me what colors you see. Tell me how my colors taste, feel, smell, and sound, and I'll tell you just what I'm thinking.


I've heard that there's a condition called synesthesia that allows people to associate color with taste, or sound, or even smell. People who "suffer" from synesthesia have gone on record to say that it just seems natural to them, and they can't imagine not tasting purple, or hearing the sound of blue, or recoiling at the odor of orange. The fact that synesthesia is referred to as a _condition_ or _disorder_ at all seems criminal to me… and the fact that most people with synesthesia claim that it's limited to _one_ unusual sense is something I find incredibly sad. Those select few people with one altered color sense can only press their curious hands and faces against the frosted glass that walls off my world, while other "normal" people can't even reach the window.

My name is Ilia Amitola, and I _am_ color.

People think that it's as simple as my skin shifting tone to follow my mood, or that I just willingly alter my pigment to emphasize what I'm feeling. Both of those things may happen, at times, but the truth runs deeper. The truth is that I experience the entire world through color, and its tastes, sounds, smells, and touches. Call it synesthesia, call it being a chameleon faunus, I don't care. I just wish people realized that when I'm blue, or pink, or silver, it isn't my skin that's colored differently- it's _me_.

Imagine your skin flushing red with embarrassment. Not your cheeks, or the bridge of your nose. _All _of your skin. Think back to your most embarrassing memory. I would bet that people were there to see it, and some of those people matter to you, or at least, used to matter. Otherwise, what's there to be embarrassed about? Imagine that frosted window that allows people only the vaguest, blob-like notion of what's going on behind the panel suddenly becoming as clear as if it was freshly-polished flat glass. Imagine yourself naked, your _heart_ naked, as you lose complete control of your self-expression and your mask falls to the ground, shattering like porcelain against concrete to let everyone around you see what you're really feeling. That sensation of primal dread, of sheer, unwilling exposure, is one that I fight to stave off every moment of every day.

Look at me, and realize that as my skin changes, my heart does, too. Realize what it means to me to feel blue, and imagine plunging a knife into my chest and raking it downward to open a bleeding slit, before curling your greedy, curious fingers around the flesh on either side of the oozing wound. I want you to tell me that you wouldn't be curious when you found a blue ribcage underneath, and a blue heart beating frantically even deeper still. I _know_ that you would stare. They _all_ stare when I cry, as my skin becomes azure against my will. That hungry, judgmental curiosity is all I can imagine is going through the minds of onlookers as they gawk and point at the girl with the funny skin, and ask each other why I'm putting on such a show to accompany my tears.

I'm not. The only "show" is my natural, brown skin tone, with its darker freckles. I hardly _ever _feel natural.

Color is an ocean. I fight constantly to tread water, and sometimes, in some beautiful, thrilling moment of control that gives me a high unlike any pill or poison, I _swim_. My skin becomes an extension of my words, and my heart beats in colors to match or compliment the raw emotion with which I fight, or speak, or dance. Those moments, though, are rare. It's far more common that I drown, consumed by flowing feelings, flowing pigments that wrap me in their tinted embrace and seep into my mind like a cloth dropped into an open bucket of paint.

Most of my life has been red. Red can encompass so many emotions, so many states of being, and I know that everyone is familiar with the classics. Rage. Love. Fire. Negative. Embarrassment. Passion. Stop. Blood. Heat. _Lust_.

Red is the color of a mind-shattering orgasm. I'm at my most red when that irritating, unstoppable need starts to permeate through my mind and body, when desire finally overpowers rationality and pragmatism. Everything inside of me is red as my wandering mind leads to wandering fingers, and wandering fingers lead to shuddering breaths on the third day of a stakeout in some cheap hotel, or just a lazy morning when my mind is locked somewhere I don't want it to be. I'm supposed to be watching what's going on outside the window, half-covered by cocked blinds, or focused on cleaning myself and getting ready for the day. Instead, I'm watching the interiors of my eyelids as I gasp and moan, lost in a fantasy. Those interiors are red, and so am I.

I look down through half-lidded eyes, and see the flesh at the base of my neck is pink, and quickly darkening. Sometimes, with a trembling hand, I undo more buttons on my white dress shirt to see that the flesh of my modest cleavage is a deep, incriminating crimson that seems to be spreading upward from within my black, lace bra. Others, I see droplets of water cascading onto my pink skin and trailing down my bare, freckled, suddenly scarlet breasts in lazy, curving patterns around my usually darkened nipples, which have suddenly become the color of a stoplight. I know that farther down my body, that color is ever-present as I creep toward a private, intense, messy release. I close my eyes again, and the pulsing sensation within my blood vessels causes the field of red vision to dance and throb. I'm drowning, and for once, I'm thankful that no one is around to throw me a lifejacket.

Sometimes, I cry out in a vermillion voice. Sometimes, I simply let my mouth gape as I squeeze my thighs together, trapping my hand and savoring the incredible sensation as I feel my fingers and legs become slick and sticky with the flood of much-needed relief. I usually need to lean back into a wall, or grab the railing on the shower door to maintain balance, but one other thing is consistent. Every time my eyes finally flutter open, my heaving chest, my arms, my hands, my reflection in the fog clinging to the shower door is entirely the color of a supermodel's perpetually wet, painted lips. It's the only time that red is ever beautiful, and the only time that red is just for me. It's the only time I see that color upon myself and feel satisfied, safe, and self-assured. Any other instance of red is just as involuntary, wild, and sometimes as passionate, but it's _always_ unwelcome.

Unlike my consistent failure to control my skin, and myself, during private moments of exploration, I can usually maintain my composure, my mask, my _colors_ when I'm angry. It's only the sort of passionate rage that leads to trembling hands and teeth clenched so tight that I fear they might snap that makes my skin begin to boil. I've had people tell me they think it's funny. I've had people back away slowly, looking at me like I was a stick of dynamite.

Every time, I was.

When I scream myself hoarse, when I drive my fist into the mouth of yet another human who thought they could treat me as property, I am red, inside and out. That color of anger, that color of animalistic violence always spreads to whoever drove me to such a point, and I see that they, too, are red on the inside, and upon the ground in a pool around themselves. It's at that point that I realize that I hate it, and how fitting it is that red is often associated with hatred. I hate the intensity with which I feel sexual need, I hate the sickeningly smug looks that humans give me once they realize that I'm a faunus, and I hate that I need to resort to violence as an enforcer of the White Fang's will. But just as there is no other way when I lose control of my color, there is no other way than violence to incite change. Nothing else has ever worked, and nothing else ever will.

Other people don't know what it's like to feel things like I do, to so clearly expose yourself and your lack of mastery of your own _fucking_ state of being as I do, and at no other time is that fact made clearer than when I'm blue.

Blue is another of the most important colors of mine, of what I would say is a set of four. Sadness. Water. Sky. Depth. Cold. Mystery. Intelligence. All of them are frivolous and inadequate to describe what it truly feels like to _be_ blue.

While red at least has the positives of sexual fulfillment before it so quickly becomes a burning shame afterward, blue is never positive in my life. _Yes_, I turn blue when I cry. _No_, it is not _every_ time, nor am I triggering the pigment shift for attention. If I am crying, and I am outwardly blue, my entire being is demanding embrace. It means that I can't hold it in, I can't be strong, and I no longer want to pretend that I am. I do a lot of pretending, but a color shift, voluntary or otherwise, _always_ means that the mask is off, and in pieces on the aforementioned concrete. Blue is a desperate wail for comfort. A longing, a begging, a reach with my entire soul for you.

Yes, you. You could be anyone. White Fang, faunus who cannot decide where they stand, even _human_, and I wouldn't care when my skin matches the color of my tears. The times that I'm blue and sobbing are times when I feel as though I could die of heartache. I'm not drowning and clawing upward at the water to try to reach the surface, I'm greedily swallowing color and praying for it to fill my lungs. The times have been few and far between, especially compared to my less serious, merely irritating periods of partial blue, but when those times _do_ come around? I can't be alone.

Blue is numbing. Blue is suffocating. Blue is _desperate_, when I'm fully there. Blue is the sickening taste of an entire bottle of pills all over my tongue and throat. Blue is the stench of exhaust from a car running with the garage door closed filling my nostrils and making me lightheaded. Blue is the scratchy feeling of a frayed rope tightly encircling my neck. Blue is the sound of the hammer of a revolver clicking backward, right next to my temple. Blue is the color of my latest attempt, and the lights on the ambulance that stopped it from being something more.

The first time I was fully blue was when I received the news that my parents had been killed in a mining accident in Atlas. I was in school, and I was brown. Natural. I was _okay_. After receiving the news, my color had shifted, and I had become an outcast in a period of mere seconds. I was alone, and truly blue for all to see. I remember running to the nearest bathroom. I remember my reflection showing me exactly what I was feeling, and I remember the mirror shattering against my fist as I tried to reject the painful truth. I remember the glass shards between my knuckles being coated in a deep navy that oozed from the fresh wounds. I remember screaming until I tried to open my mouth and could only choke. For days, I was choking on color, and waiting for it to end. I remember who finally turned me brown again. The same faunus who makes me my most red saved me from that terrible blue.

But now, I'm alone again. Now, I'm always blue, at least a little bit. It's in my eyes, it's in my heart, and it never fades. A partial, irritating blue that taints and twists the shades of my being to something I don't like. Something _off_, that I don't always recognize as me. The exception to that terrible, hollow feeling of altered color that makes it seem like I've lost myself is when I'm green.

Sickness. Life. Poison. Growth. _Envy_.

There's a reason that poison and envy are associated with green, and there's a reason that blue pairs so well with it. Envy _is_ a poison, something ever-present and nasty that taints my well of colored water, just like splashes of blue. Every now and then, my skin adopts a slightly olive tint beneath its usual chestnut hue as I look at a happy family of humans walking the streets without a care in the world. I sometimes look like a cartoon character with food poisoning when I look at the jet black, beautiful, thick hair of the girl who guides my fingers in my reddest moments. Perhaps green isn't as omnipresent in me as it once was, but the fact that I can see it in my skin when I think of her is very telling.

My eyes used to be green. My eyes are _naturally_ green, depending on your definition of natural. I want so much of what I see out there, and I wanted so badly to be just like everyone else, once. Now, all I want is to be with her, and to be _like_ her. I want to run, too. I want to believe that things can be better if I leave the White Fang, and I want an alternative that's actually worth a damn… but I know it's just something that cannot be. I know it's futile, and that's why the green only comes and goes. That's why green is so hard to control and maintain, for me. That's why, even when I _try_ to shift my eyes back to how they were when I was born, they remain blue. Green is an important color to me because I can only be green in spurts, no matter what I do… and ironically enough, that's the ultimate symbol of growth, in my mind.

Sometimes, I'm pink in places, when I'm feeling romantic, or vulnerable. I've been known to be orange when I'm feeling warm, or content. Being startled turns me white for a moment, and makes me feel near death as my heart becomes marble and stops. My skin has run the spectrum of color, time and time again, turning my flesh into a prism and my mind into a white light aimed firmly at the crystal. But there is one color that I fight hardest not to let anyone see, even though I chase it like a desperate addict searching for her next hit.

There are only a few occasions when I am yellow, and it's something that, even as a chameleon faunus, I can never force or fake. It's something that I can't call, or bribe into existence. It's always unplanned, and embarrassing enough to make me as red as I usually am inside, when it rolls around. Even so, I _crave_ it. I _savor_ it. Yellow means one thing, and one thing alone to me- true joy. It's sunshine of the soul. It's who I strive to be, and I've noticed that I'm only ever yellow when I'm with company. I've been told it makes me glow. It makes me feel like I'm a fireplace, drawing in onlookers to come and peek through that frosted window while on tiptoes, fighting for just a glance of that warmth they can see inside. When I'm yellow, I'm _home_.

Yellow tastes like fine, fluffy cake. Yellow feels like purest velvet. Yellow smells like fresh bread, new books, and the sea. Yellow sounds like her voice, back in the days when we would cuddle long into the night, and occasionally give in to the temptations of red together.

I don't know how to be yellow anymore. Maybe, sometimes, when I'm not looking, a compliment might do it for the briefest of moments. In that adrenaline rush of the aftermath of a pleasant gush of red, I think I might just flicker to yellow and back. Despite that, it's never there when I really need it, for any significant length of time. It's maddening. It's disappointing. Even when it is there, it's splashed with blue, and that makes me green all over again.

Color matters, here, inside of me. Color is how I experience the world, and myself. My life is a painting of innumerable colors, but I keep it covered by a brown, dreary canvas, because I feel like it's incomplete. It's not worth showing to most people, because all they see is an unfinished, uncontrolled mess with no rhyme or reason behind the strokes. When that's the feeling that I get from those bearing witness to my art, it's one that I absorb into myself. I feel like a sponge for color, and a sponge for judgment. Color matters so much to me, and I can see the colors in other people, even when they can't see them, themselves.

Some people are red, like roses. Others, a whitest snow. The one who keeps my thoughts chained to her shadow is a fitting black, while I've met a few people who burn with a fierce and dazzling yellow.

I feel like if I had to be a single color lately, I would be blue. The blue of the skin of a suffocating woman, clutching at her throat and trying to decide whether she's trying to breathe, or squeeze harder to help the process along. Morbid, sad, and self-loathing, I know, but there is one last thing about living through color that I've come to accept.

More can always be added, and streaks here and there can change a whole painting.

My parents used to call me their little rainbow. I'd like to think that maybe they, too, experienced the world the way that I do, and felt things with the intensity that I feel them. I want to try to pull back the brown canvas, and let everyone see what I'm working so hard on. Maybe by showing the artwork of my life, they'll start to add colors of their own to my painting, like they used to. Maybe someone will find the placement and shade of yellow that could turn my current streak of blue into a beautiful bird, or a reflection on the water. I believe it can be done. I know I can still make them proud, and in so doing, be proud of myself again. It's all just a matter of color.

I can still sing a yellow song, or kiss red lips that will ooze their color into my own. I can cultivate my green growth by learning to love myself again, and let my blue tint manifest as a desire for knowledge. I'm a chameleon, after all, so I _can't_ stay just any one color for long- not even my most common red, or most desired yellow. Life would be dull in monochrome, and I am anything but.

My name is Ilia Amitola, and I _am_ color. Call it synesthesia taken to an extreme. Call it the mad, desperate ravings of a lost girl who just wants to learn to be comfortable with herself and unafraid to show her colors to the world. Call it a pledge to fight, and fuck, and speak, and sing in colors of my choosing.

I call it being a living, breathing, messy, growing, passionate work of art. A forever changing painting of the colors of my life, on a canvas of infinite skin.


End file.
